"Does" vs. "do" can be a difficult distinction[2]. Your choice depends on whether the sentence subject is singular ("he does like cake") or plural ("bob and alice do like cake").
A good trick to make the distinction easier (and to properly identify the subject, which I still find difficult in some cases) is to rearrange the sentence as a simple affirmation:
* Startups does hire above 35.
* Startups do hire above 35.
The only exception to this rule is that you always use do when the subject is "I," "me," or "you": "I do," "you do," "do you?", "do I?", "do startups hire me?," etc (even though "I," "me," and "you" are singular).
1. The vibe I've gotten from HN and /r/programming (and from my own experience communicating in another language) is that, in general, ESL individuals find it helpful for others to point out when they make grammatical mistakes. Hopefully JamesAdir feels the same, and actually is ESL (or I'm sure I'll come out looking like a jackass), so I apologize in advance if the above is not true in this case. 2. http://data.grammarbook.com/blog/verbs/what-does-or-what-do/
It was also the friendly "grammer-nazi" post I think I've ever seen.
sorry ..
I think you meant,
It was also the friendliest "grammer-nazi" post I think I've ever seen.
I remember the AI course at univ when we needed to parse Swedish sentences -- and an English PhD student was teaching the class trivial Swedish grammar, which we all had forgotten...
You "make" them. This thread is a grammar Nazi goldmine, and I say this as a grammar Nazi for whom English is his second language.
A little shuffling around but..
But they are less likely to hire 35+ for many good reasons.
A 35+ is more likely to be have a higher salary demand due to more expertise and experience. An early bootstrapping Startup usually offer low salaries (although sugared with share options) and can only hire people very early on their salary ladder, or the ones who are not so good...
A more successful Startup often able to offer better salaries and do hire 35+, however only few startups are successful.
That is a good filtering.
A not good filtering is that a 35+ due to experience will probably know that 80 hour weeks, crunch modes etc are counter effective and are less afraid of saying no. And therefore 35+ are less attractive to entrepreneurs who are looking for people to put in their entire life into the company as they do even though they only own a tiny part of it, if that.
On top of this a 35+ often have families, hobbies, a life etc and rarely can/will do more than 40 hours per week and will not apply to startups job ads that quickly smells of continuous crunch mode.
But hey, he thinks foosball tables don't belong in offices, so why hire him at a startup?
The question wasn't "should startup hire..."
And he answered with what's happening in the field, like it or not.
So you can certainly legally not hire people over 35 years old, as long as they're not yet 40.
Once they're 40, you can not discriminate against them because they're too old (eg: Fred can't do that job, he's 50 years old) or too young (eg: We can't hire Joe for the CEO job, he's only 42.)
Of course there are many reasons to hire/not hire someone, but if you're using age as a criteria, you are on very shaky ground legally.
Another thing to consider: people who file discrimination lawsuits usually do not prevail on the discrimination claim, they prevail on the retaliation claim. It is often quite easy to show retaliation, especially if it is an employee and not an applicant.
I would argue that you can not infer much about someone's job performance based solely on their age.
Of the several hundred applicants we've gotten at Standard Treasury, the median age is likely a little less than the founding team (we're all 27-28). That age is likely even higher than most other startups that go through YC as we build enterprise software for banks -- it's not the sexiest topic in the world. Well, it is to me but you get my point.
We've hired some people that skew older compared to most other startups we know but that only seems to our benefit, frankly.
I guess it depends on the person, but, in my limited experience, hackers get better with age.
As an almost 40 geezer I think it's amazing the startup ecosystem exists for the younger crowd and wish it was more fleshed out when I was at that point in life. But I just have different priorities for myself now.
I have also spoken to a number of developers older than me who are far behind. Like they didn't understand the point of Ruby or Node and thought Php was just fine. Or they thought that all of the organizations code should go in two giant repos like the old svn way.
So the reality is that sometimes older people aren't up to date or don't share your culture.
Having said all of that I personally believe that in most respects younger developers are just as far behind as the older developers and often lacking quite a bit if perspective. Whereas older developers need to update their perspective.
Obviously it depends on the person so generalizations like those are usually going to be counterproductive because the best developers are in their own category
I want you to repeat that statement any time you feel like you have a valid stereotype that must be said. Because it should help to remind you that a stereotype is not a truth.
Don't help promote ageism. Some people make development a job, others make it a lifestyle. Age has nothing to do with that. I have devs anywhere from 25-30, and I'm often disappointed by their lack of exposure or passion for the new tech out there. But they will all go home at the end of the day and read comics, or watch TV. I'm 39, and I come home and play with a new technology or build a new product. Your age doesn't define you, your passion does.
Well said. A colleague of mine who had no GF, no family, no responsibilities at 27 continued to disappoint me on a regular basis with his lack of drive to learn. He had zero growth since joining our team, and has just signed on with a startup who made the mistake of not doing a technical interview. Whoever the team lead is who gets stuck with him is screwed. On a side note, I learned how important rigorous technical interviews are. When he told me he got the job and said it involved business intelligence/data warehousing, I mentioned to him that he had never worked with these things, and asked him if he indicated this in the interview. His response: "Well, I know SQL, and I looked at star schemas on wikipedia and it doesn't look that complicated." I then asked him (this was him giving me a 2 weeks notice) if he had contacted the team lead to find out what the tech stack was so he could start reading up on using any tools he wasn't familiar with. This hadn't even occurred to him.
Lack of passion spans the age groups.
At my current startup, around the time I joined we were explicitly only looking for senior developers who were generally at the top of their game. As a result we _mostly_ hired people who were at least 28, and often significantly over 30 because that seems to be about the time you hit that point. Needless to say, we hired a lot of people with kids. I personally had my first kid one month after hire, and I was very open about that timing in my interviews.
So yeah, it depends on the startup, but it seems to me that any startup that isn't willing to hire "older" developers is discriminating their way out of many of the top candidates.
On the other hand, I've known plenty of startups who're happy to hire older people for junior roles. They just get fewer old applicants.
I don't know if there's also a significant bias against older employees. I can believe there is. Either way, I'm certain that it's not the biggest reason startups tend to hire young people.
1) What profile is the startup trying to fill in? Adult supervision (read COO) at a fast growing venture backed company run by barely out of teens? You might want to poach someone like Ms. Sandberg.
2) Which sector and industry is the startup plying in? Is it enterprise software? Hiring for a VP engineering or an Engineering Manager? Hadoop or Solr specialist? Need years of experience/ deep knowledge. 20 somethings might not be the best fit. Enterprise startups like Altiscale, BitGlass, BrightFunnel, were in the news this week (funding rounds, launch) .. look at their about us pages, plenty of experience and grey hair.
Horses for courses work fairly well, inside and outside the startup world.
At the new company, we hire for cultural fit, and this means we tend towards (but aren't exclusive) people around our own age (27, on average). But we have a fairly wide distribution around that.
It depends.(tm)
Most older people would tend to have a better skill set and the startups would love to get that, but they wouldn't want to pay for it. Furthermore, older people might be more risk averse (Will this company stick around for more than 3 months?).
All very broad generalisations, understood.
that said, there are roles that require more experience/industry relationships/gravitas as a company matures (e.g., Sandberg as COO) and that often correlates with age.
And I've asked myself this because of this picture of MixPanel employees: https://mixpanel.com/jobs/
TBH Attitude is far more important than age (and skills)
I get very tired of comments like this that imply that working at a start-up or software company is somehow "better" than working at other jobs, especially those that require a reasonable level of skill.
Please don't look down on people.
EDIT: Hmm, I suppose the point is that a hairdresser doesn't have the range of skills a start-up should be interested in. But still, it reads poorly.
I think you're mis-reading the intent of my comment
Of course skills matter (I'm unlikely to hire a hair-dresser who has never done anything other than cut hair for a development role - but I have hired "career changers" like this for other roles - like support / sales).
HOWEVER if I'm judging two candidates with suitable (define as you will) skill sets then the one with the better attitude will always get the role
TBH this is even more important when it comes to internal promotions than for initial hiring (but now we're going slightly off topic)
For internal promotions, it's called "being visible" and "managing up", where again, appearance is more important than capability.
I knew what you were trying to get at, but wanted to point out that the sentence that you initially wrote wasn't entirely accurate.
Of course I agree that attitude matters, but skills are certainly important, hence my comment.
That depends in part on whether the 35-year-old is functionally literate.